So, I just had an interesting idea for a 2.0 redesign that could kill the problems with Dictionaries, array labeling, and OffsetArrays with one stone. Someone recently put out a very nice package which distinguishes between: Ordinal indices (the 1st index is always the same as first(x), and so on)…

[image] ParadaCarleton: Aren’t there a bunch of libraries that implement array labels with roughly 0 runtime cost? “0 runtime cost” for which operations? Looking at AxisKeys.jl as an example: Iterating over such an array - zero overhead. Regular numeric indexing - zero overhead. “Indexing”…

Just to give an example of how runtime costs may be more complicated than you think, here is a simple comparison of a matrix * vector computation for a Matrix{Float64} vs. a Dict{CartesianIndex{2}, Float64}, with the latter multiplication implemented in the obvious way (two nested loops). julia> us…

[image] stevengj: It’s “only” 50× slower than Matrix–vector multiplication: To be fair, this is specifically due to Dict inefficiencies. The same code with Dictionaries.jl is about 5x faster, totalling to 10x overhead over Matrix-Vector.

Wait, we have a 5x overhead in our Dict? where?

This is because of how Dict works right now, not because of any problems with labels being slow. To prove it, here’s matrix-vector multiplication with DimensionalData.jl: julia> @btime $da * $dv 254.719 ns (1 allocation: 272 bytes) julia> @btime $a * $v 253.645 ns (1 allocation: 272 bytes) Al…

[image] ParadaCarleton: To prove it, here’s matrix-vector multiplication with DimensionalData.jl: DimensionalData only names the axes (and furthermore the axes labels are static, part of the type, which indeed has zero runtime overhead), which is a totally different problem from representing …

DimensionalData.jl does have runtime labels. But these are in addition to the indices of the data array. The slow thing is looking up elements by label, which has to first find an index. Operations like * won’t use that at all, and just act on the data array. Dictionaries.jl is somewhere half way b…

I don’t think I’ll join the debate about whether dictionaries should be unordered and have ordered counterparts, as in Base, or whether dictionaries should be ordered and have unordered counterparts, as in Dictionaries.jl. FWIW, Python used to do the former, but has been moving to the latter . I gue…

Thinking about this some more though, I don’t think my idea works. Specifically, a type like OrdinalLastOffset might be useful if it’s fed directly into getindex, but for things like generators and comprehensions: what is supposed to determine the ending index? Example: g(a) = sum(a[i,j]+b[i,j] f…

[image] uniment: If we’re lucky, it might (:crossed_fingers:) be possible to sneak it in before Julia 2.0 and not break anything by using a longer identifier: It should definitely be possible to have this without any breaking changes, by specifying that the cardinal indices of all arrays ar…

Ordinal Indexing as a Language Feature

Internals & Design

uniment December 27, 2022, 9:14pm 24

I should’ve re-read the PSA This opens things up quite a bit.

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Ordinal Indexing as a Language Feature

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